Today I went with my fellow classmates and teachers to visit a centre for prostitutes in Oslo. Before I went, I did not have many opinions regarding this issue other than that it should be illegal. Sadly, we did not get the opportunity to talk to people who sell sexual favours for a living, but we had the opportunity to see a nice presentation by one of the social workers at the centre.

As almost everyone else, many people have stereotypes when it comes to prostitution and the global sex industry. The sex industry is comprised of not just prostitution, but also pornography and sex toys as well as human trafficking. The law is clear on what is illegal and what is legal. Elin Kock, the co-worker at Prosentret, went through the legal framework of Norway’s prostitution and pimping laws. She also made me expand my horizons and see that one thing is connected to another thing and that I have to see the larger picture. This larger picture is connected to push and pull factors and economic migration. One of the reasons that we do not have many ethnic Norwegian prostitutes is because we live in a welfare state that looks after all of its citizens so that they do not have to take this drastic solution.

]]>https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2017/02/20/my-visit-to-prosentret/feed/0awmo0408Dear future Presidenthttps://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/11/15/dear-future-president/
https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/11/15/dear-future-president/#commentsTue, 15 Nov 2016 07:47:52 +0000http://awilatschool.wordpress.com/?p=328]]>My letter to the next POTUS
Dear Hillary Clinton. It is highly that you are going to become the next President of the United States. I hope that you become the change that the world needs, but looking at your record of accomplishment does not give me the slightest hope of change. You have ousted a democratically elected President, killed an incumbent leader of a sovereign nation, backed two of the most devastating wars in our lifetime and helped a racist regime crackdown on Palestinians.

I cannot tell you how to run your own country, but I can tell you to try to look after the working class. It is just sad to me that a western developed country does not have healthcare for its entire population. Your country lacks infrastructure, education and healthcare, and yet you focus more on selling the Saudis weapons? Please take care of your own people and for once be a President that is not imperialist, colonialist or centrist. Build a better Obamacare, call it Hillary care if you want to.
I hope that you become the real change that America so desperately needs.

]]>https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/11/15/dear-future-president/feed/4awmo0408Humans of Oslohttps://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/09/13/humans-of-oslo/
https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/09/13/humans-of-oslo/#respondTue, 13 Sep 2016 16:41:29 +0000http://awilatschool.wordpress.com/?p=288]]>Hey, guys! Today we went to Oslo on a class trip to the Nobel Peace Center, but we also worked on a project called Humans of Oslo. We paired up and went around in the city asking people questions and trying to find interesting people to interview.
The exercise was quite scary at the beginning, but as i stopped more and more people I felt more comfortable. This is the most interesting guy that I interviewed;

Shkair Ayyad

“I was born in occupied Al-Khalil(Hebron) in Palestine. If I could meet any person i would meet Netanyahu(The Isreali PM) to tell him to stop occupying my country!”

Shkair is working on a Palestine-stand outside Youngstorget to rally support and money to Palestine. He thinks of himself as a grassroots activist.

“The thing that i am most grateful for in my life is my wife and our marriage. more than three decades now!”

They married at Jerusalem, a city which they now can not enter as it is under Israeli occupation and all exile-Palestinians are banned.

“I hope that I one time i can go back to Palestine and continue teaching there. I was actually a teacher in Dubai with my wife for 20 years! And now i have lived in Norway for 16 years! I love it here. The cold doesn’t bother me, it is the personality of the people that draws me to this wonderful place.”

“If you don’t have good teachers at Sandvika, tell me!”

// Initially i thought that it was going to be scary and hard to have an ordinary conversation with random people on the street, but I found some really interesting people that had so much to say. My overall experience is that it was fun and educating to learn about humans in this way while also using the English language to express yourself in a good way.

— Shkair agreed to his picture being published at my blog for educational purpose only.

Many young people choose to go abroad to study or work. What might be the reasons for this?

– I think that many young people want to leave the “nest” and try to experience the world for themselves. They want to broaden their perspective on things, and that can`t happen in their hometown and within a safe and trustable environment.

Multiculturalism

What is multiculturalism? Can you give examples of multicultural societies? What possibilities and challenges do multicultural societies face?

– A multicultural society is a tolerant and open society with different ethnic backgrounds and cultures. Norway is a multicultural society, and I am also multicultural as I am ethnically an African, but also Norwegian.

There are many different global issues in the world news scene at the moment but the biggest I think are global terrorism, culture clashes, inflation and Brexit as well as the ludicrous US presidential race between two of the least favourable personalities in that country(according to a Pew research poll).

]]>https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/272/feed/7download (1)awmo0408Feedback to the exercise `Breaking the ice`https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/feedback-to-the-exercise-breaking-the-ice/
https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/feedback-to-the-exercise-breaking-the-ice/#commentsTue, 30 Aug 2016 10:47:40 +0000http://awilatschool.wordpress.com/?p=243]]>Hey, guys! This is a new year, and I’m still enrolling at Sandvika High school in the second grade! I have a new international English class, and our teacher Dave – or David(From Africa! ;)) and he wanted to make us feel less shy in class. He asked us to do some fun, but quite uncomfortable exercises.
My expectations for today’s lesson was probably to get to know the group better and do some fun activities related to learning international English.
At first, I taught that I wouldn’t like it all, as I feel that I am trespassing on others private sphere, but after a while, I found it quite interesting.
At first, I felt shy, uncomfortable, excited, interested and curious. I felt those feelings because I don’t know anyone in the class except for one or two people, but I was also quite curious to find out what Dave had prepared for us.
Today I learnt that I can trust people whom I don’t know, and I also learnt that I have a rich fantasy and that I imagine things that aren’t there.]]>https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/feedback-to-the-exercise-breaking-the-ice/feed/211154821.5480fda6b146eawmo0408My advice to next year studentshttps://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/06/01/my-advice-to-next-year-students/
https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/06/01/my-advice-to-next-year-students/#commentsWed, 01 Jun 2016 09:34:49 +0000http://awilatschool.wordpress.com/?p=185]]>We`ve listened to three different commencement speeches at Harvard university and a New Orleans University by Ellen Degeneres, a popular talk show hostess, J.K Rowling a world renounced author and Steven Spielberg, a famous producer.
Ellen`s speech is about the acceptance and importance of failure. She says that failure is something that makes you stronger and that its has an important lesson. She doesn’t think that students that have graduated will face any difficulties, but she thinks that failure is a necessity experience. She went trough a dark time, but she emerged as a well known and renowned talk show hostess.

J.K. Rowling used her speech also to talk about the relevance of failure. She talked about how poverty affected her and her family to such a degree that she got depressed. Rowling went to a British University and got a degree in classic linguistic, but she failed to get any good job. Later she was discovered and wrote several books. Writing books were her passion, and she went for it. She also encouraged the students, that are so lucky to live in a rich and free part of the world, to stand up in solidarity with the oppressed people in the world.We have an advantage in this world, and it is our responsibility to do something to change the world.

The third commencement speaker was Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg`s speech was about the importance of a degree.
He dropped out of college in the sophomore year and started working for Universal. Later in his fifties, he enrolled college once again and got his degree. He walks the talk as well.
The degree further opened his eyes to life outside his little bubble. He started to produce movies with meaning and passion.
Spielberg uses an analogy between a hero and a villain. Every person needs a villain to vanquish. He believes that every human has a character defining moment every day.
Spielberg also talks about the rise of hatred in the world, and how we can combat hate. With love, he says. His advice to the graduates is that they must never lose eye-contact and that human connection is fading because of social medias.

The common factor between all the three commencement speakers is that inclusion is important. Spielberg stressed the fact that the US is a nation of immigrants, for now(referring to the presumed Republican candidate Donald Trumps remarks on deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants), and Rowling made a point that we are lucky to live in a part of the world where we enjoy and perhaps take our democratic rights for granted. The graduates are the future leaders of this world and it is important that they have healthy and inclusive opinions and values. We should do something for the rest of the world that have not been as lucky as us and won the golden prize in the lottery.

My advice to the next year students is that they come to this school with an open mind. You must be ready to further your perspective on how learning is done. If you come with an open mind, ready to try out new things and also experience new things.
I experienced that it was quite hard to focus the first days at school because of my classmates MAC`s and PC`s, but I can promise you that it gets easier if you try to follow what the teachers say, and don’t let the others disrupt your education and your future.
You should also know that getting good grades in High school demands hard work and that you should be prepared to stepping up the game.

Cheers!

– Mohamed Awil

]]>https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/06/01/my-advice-to-next-year-students/feed/2social-inclusion-handsawmo0408About a boyhttps://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/about-a-boy/
https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/about-a-boy/#commentsWed, 18 May 2016 11:09:31 +0000http://awilatschool.wordpress.com/?p=177]]>A few weeks ago we watched the movie `About a boy`. The movie is based on the book written by Nick Hornby. However, those in my class that chose to read Hornby’s book say that the movie is slightly different than the book and that different scenes take place in the movie wich are not in the book.

The plot in the movie is about Will Freeman, a rich guy who has never had an honest job, and who has no idea about what he wants to do with his life. He sleeps with younger women and even lies to them and makes up a fictional two-year-old boy.
One day he meets a young boy named Marcus wich he develops a friendship with. Will begins to think that this 12-year old boy is more mature than him and in the end of the movie we get to see a Will that has grown.

I think that the message of the movie is that you can`t always equate adulthood with maturity.

I would personally not recommend the movie to others because I found it quite boring and confusing at times. The climax of the movie was also not entertaining. The entire movie seems kind of unsystematic and I feel like the producers failed to catch my interest.

Every day we see pictures of dead refugees in the sea, we hear about ISIS (The “Islamic” state) and their atrocities committed against minorities and everyone who does not condone their form of ultra-orthodox Salafism. We hear about densely populated areas bombed by barrel bombs, we hear about the al-Assad forces committing war crimes and about refugees fleeing war and met by European police with rubber bullets and tear gas. The big question mark in the crisis that evolves around two continents is; does Europe have the ability to take in more refugees and how can we stop the bloodshed in Syria?

In the past weeks, we have been working on our in-depth project where we could choose a topic of our choice. I chose the Syrian civil war and the European refugee crisis. Here is an extract from the five pages long article i wrote. What do you think about my introduction to the theme? Constructive criticism folks!

]]>https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/04/27/in-depth-project/feed/2awmo0408My reading of The Absolutely true diary of a part-time indianhttps://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/my-reading-of-the-absolutely-true-diary-of-a-part-time-indian/
https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/my-reading-of-the-absolutely-true-diary-of-a-part-time-indian/#commentsWed, 06 Apr 2016 10:17:14 +0000http://awilatschool.wordpress.com/?p=143]]>The themes that were discussed in the book were very relevant to the everyday lifes of people who live on reservations. The author managed to write about dark themes like Arnold Junior fathers alcoholisism and death on the reservations. Alexie also took up themes sorrounding love and hope. Junior fell in love with the white girl named Penelope and he saw some form of light at the end of the tunnel when he transferred to Reardan High school.

The happening in the book happens on the reservation in Winnipit and the white small city some miles up north named Reardan. The enviroment that surrounds Junior is one wich is abusive and racist. He does not fit into the white society nor the native american community. He is constantly surrounded by death and funerals and hopelessness.

The plot of the story is that Junior decides to transfer to a white school nearby so that he can recivie a proper education. He gets branded as a traitor and he is hated by everyone on the reservations or the rez as he calls it.
He is also a basketball player and he must play with his new teammates from the white team against his former teammates from the school at the reservation.Along the transfer many bad things happen to Junior but he manages to overcome the obstacles.

Junior changes from the start of the book to the end. He is quite insecure at the begining and he feels as if he does not deserve better. He thinks that it is his destiny to stay at the reservation and live below the poverty line. At the end he understands that he has a right to be ambitious and to follow his dreams. He gets more secure on himself and he becomes more happy even though calamities happen to him on a daily basis.

My own impression of the book is that it was a well written and real book. Alexie is a realist and he does not try to beautify the truth, and this makes his book seem more legit and true. I found the words and language that he used to be simply hilarious. Overall i think that this is one of the better books i have read.

]]>https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/my-reading-of-the-absolutely-true-diary-of-a-part-time-indian/feed/7shermanalexieawmo0408Sherman Alexies Bookhttps://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/sherman-alexies-book/
https://awilatschool.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/sherman-alexies-book/#commentsTue, 29 Mar 2016 18:21:44 +0000http://awilatschool.wordpress.com/?p=129]]>Sherman Alexie was born on a reservation and is a Native American. He left his family to pursue an education. My first impression of him was that he seems like a down to earth person and quite relaxed. Alexie grew up with many difficulties including alcoholic problems. Even though he still kept his head up and made some achievements.

The book is based on how Sherman Alexie grew up and some of the obstacles he faced growing up. I choose to read this book because it kind of had an appeal to me in comparison to the other book.

Nick Hornby`s book “About a boy” does also seem interesting, but it did not have the same appeal to me. The interview was quite boring and i did not understand what they were discussing. I did not quite get the relevance of the themes they discussed.

Nick Hornby’s book “About a boy” seems interesting as well, but in the interview, I did not understand when the interviewer and Nick talked about the book or when they talked about Nick. They also talked a lot about music and I did not get the entire content of the conversation.